'The Batman' director on that surprising ending and where it might lead

If you sat through all three hours of The Batman, you may have felt a familiar presence at the end.

Spoilers ahead for the Matt Reeves film starring Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz.

Director Matt Reeves told Variety that the character who speaks to The Riddler (Paul Dano) from the shadows of Arkham Asylum in the final scenes is in fact the Joker (Barry Keoghan), but that he may or may not be setting up a sequel.

“I never was trying to say like, ‘Hey, guess what, here’s the Joker. Next movie!'” he said. “The idea was more to say, ‘Hey, look, if you think that trouble is going to go away in Gotham, you can forget it. It’s already here. And it’s already delicious.'”

Reeves put a lot of careful planning into this Joker, but always with the understanding that the character might not return. It could be a sequel, it could be a show, or it could be nothing — and he told Keoghan as much.

“There might be places,” Reeves told Variety. “There’s stuff I’m very interested in doing in an Arkham space, potentially for HBO Max. There are things we’ve talked about there. So it’s very possible. It also isn’t impossible, that there is some story that comes back where Joker comes into our world.”

Reeves revealed that Keoghan's Joker originally had a bigger part in the film, that Batman seeks him out earlier to help understand the Riddler's mindset. The scene was cut to simplify an already dense movie, but Reeves hopes to release it eventually. He kept the second scene, despite initial hesitation.

"It changed people’s response to the very ending of the movie, to see that Gotham was still Gotham, and that Batman really didn’t have a choice," he said. "He has to keep doing what he’s gonna do.”

Though he's mostly in shadow, Keoghan's Joker was inspired by Conrad Veidt in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs, in which the main character has a disease that makes him smile constantly. Reeves and prosthetic makeup artist Michael Marino perfected the look, and the background research informed a Joker with strong history and motivation, even if he isn't on screen for long.

The Batman is now playing in theaters.